Not really. That’s the sad part. They seemingly have a death sentence either way. They’ve tried to rehabilitate captive whales multiple times and it’s not been successful. If you dumped them in the wild they would essentially just starve to death.
Just evil, the whole situation.
These kinds of conversations make me miss WASTE.
Welcome to Costco. I love you.
If they talk bad about other people, especially if you don’t know the would-be friend very well. If they’ll bad mouth other people to you they’re gonna bad mouth you to other people.
You keep moving the goal posts.
If you can’t see the difference between someone’s random opinion on the internet and someone paying actual money to oppress actual people - I don’t think we have much common ground to have a reasonable discussion.
One is a law that actually affects real people. One is a belief. What is hard to understand?!? These aren’t remotely the same thing.
If someone threatened to murder your family vs someone who paid someone to murder your family — which person is worse?
You’re not far off. Any license for collectibles certainly restricts the print run to ratios determined by the licensor. The person granting a license doesn’t want the person using the license to devalue it.
I think you may be conflating fakes with counterfeits. While technically not “fake” cards they were fraudulent counterfeits. I know it’s muddy as frequently fraud and forgery and fake and counterfeit are used somewhat interchangeably colloquially but they aren’t all the same thing.
Counterfeit was the term they used in the lawsuit so I reflected that, though it’s usually used to imply a believable forgery. Counterfeit is the correct term but I can see the confusion as usually counterfeits are a fake product pretending to be real. This is a “real” product that is not supposed to be sold.
Upper deck was not licensed to make cards for the US market. Even if they were - they are not allowed to just print whatever cards they wanted. The ratios, print runs, and distribution were predetermined by Konami per their license and contract.
So they were printing genuine productions of the cards - but without a license to do so. Then they began selling those behind Konami in a market they weren’t permitted to distribute in. Upper deck took all the profit from those sales. That’s multiple levels of fraud.
I’m honestly surprised UD somehow managed to survive the lawsuit. Konami had a slam dunk. They had to have paid Konami some ungodly amount of money to get out from under that, not to mention the personal legal liability of whatever executives were involved in scheming up that fraud.
Upper Deck was the king of sports trading cards and even though they were making hundreds of millions in the 80s, they got caught creating counterfeit versions of the most desirable cards to make even more money. Once they got caught there wasn’t much to be done as it wasn’t actually illegal for them to do so. It soured the collectors market for a long long time.
Circle back around to around 2000 and upper deck somehow got a license to print Yugioh cards in Europe. Only, they decided to start also making counterfeit cards of the 10 most desirable cards and made 50K of each of them and started seeding the collector market in the US by selling them in the states to make even MORE money. It wasn’t long before they got caught and then sued and settled out of court for some insane amount of money.
Somehow they’re still around and printing sports cards. It’s kind of mind boggling.
White noise. The white noise knocks me out almost immediately.
This should get you past the paywall: https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.telegraph.co.uk%2Ffilms%2F0%2Fbarbenheimer-is-cinemas-most-seismic-moment-in-a-decade%2F
Population contraction and major shifts in wages compared to cost of living.